Wednesday, August 5, 2015

One pharma company takes away funding; another one puts up

Ok, so it's not exactly "Shark Tank" or Donald Trump's "The Apprentice," but the University of California is launching a competition for life science startups created by UC entrepreneurs. The wanna-be life sciences success stories will compete for prizes totaling $300,000. That's peanuts for The Donald, of course, but enough clams to help keep a young startup cooking until VC and angel funding starts flowing. The winner will net $150,000. Three other successful startups will be awarded $50,000 each. Applications for the so-called primeUC contest are due Sept. 25, so interested companies in fields such as drug-development, consumer health, diagnostics and medical devices need to act fast to be included. To be eligible for the inaugural competition, startups must:

Be a life science technology company.

Have been founded by a UC faculty or staff member, or be managed or founded by a UC student, postdoctoral fellow or alumnus.

Have raised less than $1 million in private funding.

The new contest, announced Tuesday morning, is part of President Janet Napolitano's broader Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, as the University of California continues its efforts to nab more of the startup street cred currently held by rival Stanford University. The competition, possibly the first of several such match-ups "to help the most promising UC-assisted startups obtain seed funding," officials said Tuesday, is a collaboration with Johnson & Johnson LLC, another new step for the sometimes stodgy university system. Dianne Klein, a UC spokeswoman, clarified that collaboration, in this instance, means that J&J is putting up the $300,000. "We're always looking for ways to get money," she said...